Banksy (34 page)

The stunts 007 pulled off in his films, however, were nothing compared to the one Ray Wilson managed during our visit to Pinewood, where a buffet lunch was supplemented by a copious amount of bottled beer. As soon as Alf saw the beer on offer, he immediately restricted everyone to one bottle each. Ray Wilson somehow managed surreptitiously to consume about eight during the lunchbreak. As the afternoon wore on, Ray became more and more outrageous and loud. We managed to keep him out of trouble, though it was touch-and-go at times. Ray didn’t help his cause, especially when we met Yul Brynner, who told us that he was soon to appear in the theatre in Newcastle reprising his role in the musical
The King And I
.

‘What’re they calling it up there, then?’ asked Ray, much to the amusement of himself. ‘The King and Why Aye?’

We spent the afternoon trying to keep Ray as far away from Alf as possible. If Alf had ever discovered what state Ray was in, he would be in big trouble and may even have been dropped from the squad.

Mexico and France had played out a 1–1 draw in their opening game, which was a good result for us. It meant that we went into our game against Mexico with every team in the group level on points.

Mexico were not right out of the top drawer of international football, but were a useful side whose main strength was their very organized and effective defence. Against England they opted for a sweeper, Jesus del Muro, who played his club football for Cruz Azul. Del Muro started the game playing behind a back four with 22-year-old Ignacio Calderón of Guadalajara in goal. For nearly forty minutes we floundered on Mexico’s resolute back line. I remember thinking that it was going to take something
special for us to breach their defence. No sooner had I thought this, than Bobby Charlton conjured up a piece of football magic that was very special indeed.

Bobby received the ball deep in our half of the field and, like a thoroughbred racehorse, glided down the pitch with the Mexicans conceding midfield and falling back around their penalty area. Bobby kept the ball under immaculate control and, when looking up some thirty-five yards from goal, saw his way barred by a blanket of olive shirts. He took the ball on another five yards, no more, then, without breaking stride and with hardly any backlift, hit a thunderbolt of a shot with his right foot. The ball cut through the air like a bullet and was still rising as it ballooned the back of Calderón’s net. Wembley erupted and I dare say millions of people across England leapt from their armchairs. It was a tremendous goal in the true Bobby Charlton tradition. We were off the mark, and how!

All these years later, Bobby’s thunderbolt against Mexico is still considered to be among football’s all-time greatest goals, and rightly so. In the dressing room after the game we heaped praise on Bobby for his marvellous effort only for Bobby’s brother, Jack, to intervene impishly.

‘You’re full of compliments for our kid,’ laughed Jack, ‘but what you’re all forgetting is, it was me who made the two-yard pass that set him on his way!’

Ominously, in Group Two, Argentina were involved in a bad-tempered match with West Germany. Over 47,000 turned up at Villa Park expecting to see a vibrant encounter between two fancied teams. What they saw was a dull, defensive battle littered with fouls. Argentina’s Jorge Albrecht received his marching orders following a very reckless challenge, though many thought that several of his countrymen should have followed him. Argentina had beaten Spain 2–1 and knew a draw against the Germans would be enough to see them progress to the quarter-finals. West Germany, whose attack had ravaged Switzerland, were choked by a ten-man Argentine defence well
marshalled by their skipper, Antonio Rattin. The behaviour of the Argentinian players left much to be desired and their dirty tactics and petulance resulted in a warning from FIFA about their future conduct. As we were to find out, it went unheeded.

In Group Three Portugal coasted to a 3–0 victory over Bulgaria, which ended the Bulgarians’ hopes of further progression, while at Roker Park one blinding flash of genius from I gor Chislenko of Moscow Dynamo gave Russia a 1–0 win over Italy. Against Russia, Italy left out their ‘golden boy’ Giovanni Rivera of AC Milan, and their leading goalscorer, Paolo Barison of Roma. The casual approach of the Italians suggested they believed they had some divine right of qualification. The Italians believed their defeat against Russia to be of little consequence, as their remaining tie was against North Korea, a team the star-studded Italians expected to beat easily. Such optimism would prove to be misplaced for one of the greatest World Cup upsets of all time was in the offing.

The day before our victory over Mexico I joined my England team mates to watch what was without doubt one of the best games of the qualifying stage. That night, to the accompaniment of 52,000 wildly cheering fans at Goodison Park, I witnessed the demise of Brazil. Their conquerors were Hungary by three goals to one, and the Hungarian victory was well deserved.

The Brazilian team was a mixture of youth and experience, welded together by the great Pelé. Pelé, however, was injured and watched from the stands as his team mates were torn apart by a rampant Hungary who, in Ferenc Bene and Florian Albert, possessed players of lightning speed whose direct running caused Brazil all manner of problems.

It was an exhilarating game, the speed and tempo of which laid bare the defects of the Brazilians. Sadly, old hands such as Bellini, Djalma Santos and even the great Garrincha, had no answer to the pace of the Hungarians, while the younger members of the side – Jairzinho, Tostao and Alcindo – lacked the necessary experience.

When Portugal finally put paid to Brazil by the same scoreline in their next game, it came as no surprise. The press hailed it as the end of an era. With the benefit of hindsight, it wasn’t. Brazil were merely a team in transition. They had too many players over the age of thirty and too many youngsters. The notable exception was Pelé, who at twenty-five, though yet to reach his prime, had already won two World Cup winners’ medals. Though substitutes were still not allowed, teams could name a non-playing reserve. For their games against Hungary and Portugal, the Brazilian reserve was Edu, who at sixteen was the youngest player in this World Cup. His inclusion was indicative of a Brazilian team in the throes of major change and whose sights were set on the future.

Pelé didn’t fail in the ’66 World Cup, he was kicked out of the competition. The great man returned against Portugal, but the treatment meted out to him by Oporto’s João Morais was more brutal than that which had resulted in his injury against Bulgaria.

Pelé’s injury after half an hour put an end to what the press said would be ‘a contest to decide the world’s greatest player’ between him and Eusebio. Everywhere he went Pelé was surrounded by three Portuguese defenders who were none too subtle in dealing with him. The leniency with which referees viewed physical and robust play in this era was evidenced by a scything tackle from Morais that made no contact with the ball and took Pelé out at the knee. The referee, George McCabe of England, simply awarded a free kick, as probably most referees of the time would have done. Football was considered to be primarily a physical game. When a foul was committed, a free kick was given and that was usually the only action deemed necessary. The players accepted this lenient view as did those who watched the game. Only in exceptional circumstances was a player sent off. When a player did receive his marching orders it was usually for persistent foul play, or for one tackle that was considered by the referee to be career-threatening to the victim.
The tackle from behind was an accepted part of the game, certainly by Europeans, and body-checking was part of the football culture of South America. Football may have been emerging as the beautiful game, but it still followed a very hard and sometimes cynical script.

The players who fouled Pelé received at most a ticking-off from the referee, to which the common response was a knowing smile. That foul was nothing personal, the smiler implied, I’m just doing my job.

Pelé was kicked out of the World Cup, but even if he had been fully fit and firing on all cylinders, Brazil would have had little chance of winning the World Cup. They were simply not good enough for that. The supporters, however, had paid good money to see the world’s greatest footballer in action and they should not have been robbed of that sight by such cynicism. Portugal’s approach against Brazil baffled me, quite simply because they had no need to resort to such shabby tactics – they were good enough to beat Brazil with their sheer footballing craft. In Eusebio they possessed the one player who could come anywhere near Pelé’s brilliance.

The 1966 World Cup produced many memorable images of great, golden moments. In contrast to that is the haunting photograph of Pelé’s exit from the tournament. With a coat draped round him, he looks sadly over his right shoulder as he limps from the Goodison Park pitch. His expression seems to be asking, ‘Why?’ At the same time there is something in his eyes that suggests he was also thinking, ‘I’ll be back.’

While everyone was digesting the fact of Brazil’s elimination, the unbelievable news came that North Korea had beaten Italy 1–0 at Ayresome Park. The Italians were out, undone earlier by their swaggering overconfidence against the Russians. The scale of the upset was comparable to the United States’ defeat of England at Belo Horizonte in 1950.

The Italians had, on the night, looked a strangely dispirited bunch and the unknown Koreans seized their chance. The goal
that clinched it was scored by Pak Doo Ik, who, as a result, found himself immortalized in football folklore. The Koreans had played as if they meant to win, the Italians as if they were in a dream. North Korea’s victory set Teesside alight. Middlesbrough had not produced the biggest crowds for the World Cup, but it had produced fantastic support for the Koreans, whom the Teessiders adopted as their second team.

North Korea joined Russia in qualifying for the quarter-finals from Group Four and were to be far from finished as far as shock scorelines were concerned. The Italians flew home with their tails between their legs. When they landed at Genoa airport they were pelted with tomatoes and eggs, and their manager, Edmundo Fabbri, was immediately dismissed. Like Brazil, they too had to rebuild for the future.

In our final group game two poacher’s goals from Liverpool’s Roger Hunt gave us a 2–0 victory over France. The win saw us top our group with two wins and one draw to our name. Most satisfactorily from my point of view, we were yet to concede a goal.

Our success was somewhat tempered by two problems. Nobby Stiles picked up a booking following a foul on Jacques Simon of Nantes, which meant that should Nobby pick up another caution, he would be out of the tournament. Nobby was very worried about this. His fiercely competitive, robust style of play had been described in some quarters as ‘dirty’ and the general consensus of opinion among the press was that Alf Ramsey should check Nobby’s robustness, or simply leave him out of the side. Nobby was a tigerish tackler, but I knew him well enough to know that he never deliberately hurt an opponent. Every team needed a hard-man ball-winner and Nobby fulfilled that role for us. They didn’t come much smaller in stature or bigger in heart than Nobby. He was a bubbling, bouncing dynamo of football industry, permanently hungry for the ball, and took it as a personal affront that he might be denied it.

There was only ten stone of Nobby, but many opponents
recoiled from engaging with him in the tackle as if they had been confronted by ten tons. There was nothing subtle about his tackling and once he won the ball he was not a fluent distributor of it, rarely passing it more than a few yards. But that was all he was supposed to do. Both Nobby Stiles and Alan Ball accomplished this task with great success, as Alf had perfectly summed it up during one of our training sessions. Alf had emphasized that he wanted Nobby and Alan to go out and win the ball.

‘What do you want us to do with the ball when we get it?’ asked Nobby.

‘Do you both have dogs?’ asked Alf. Nobby and Alan both nodded. ‘And do you ever take your dogs on to a public park?’ asked Alf. ‘Throw a rubber ball about and tell the dog to run after it, bring it back, and lay it at your feet?’

‘Yes,’ replied Nobby and Alan together.

‘That is what I want you to do for Bobby Charlton,’ said Alf. Get the ball, give it to Bobby. Simple, but crucial to England’s effectiveness.

Alf was under pressure not only from some quarters of the press but from certain FA officials to drop Nobby, but once again he showed that he was his own man and that team selection was entirely his domain and no one else’s. ‘Just play your usual fair but hard game, Nobby,’ Alf said, ‘and leave me to do the worrying.’

Our second problem to arise from the game against France was more serious. Jimmy Greaves was on the end of a very late challenge from Jean Bonnel that resulted in an ugly gash on his left shin requiring fourteen stitches. With our quarter-final against Argentina only three days away, we all knew that there was no way Jimmy was going to be fit.

Having finished top of our group, we had qualified for the quarter-finals along with second-placed Uruguay. West Germany and Argentina went through from Group Two. Portugal and Hungary from Group Three, with Russia and the surprise package, North Korea, from Group Four.

Against France, Alf had once again opted for one orthodox winger by playing Ian Callaghan from Liverpool. With Jimmy Greaves injured, I knew Alf had to make a change for the team against Argentina, but had no idea he would alter things so dramatically. We had used three different line-ups in our three group matches. For the Argentina game Alf made a monumental decision. He decided to ditch wingers completely and play two midfield players in wide positions – Alan Ball on the right and Martin Peters on the left. Alf also introduced Geoff Hurst as a replacement for the injured Jimmy G.

The 4–4–2 formation we had adhered to for some time went out the window. We were now to play 4–4–3. I thought at the time that the decision to dispense with wingers was a good one. Alan Ball and Martin Peters were highly intelligent players. They worked tirelessly, dropped back and helped out in defence, were good when going forward and, particularly in the case of Martin Peters, could make quality crosses into the opposition’s penalty area. More importantly, those crosses were made early, before opponents had time to get organized in defence.